


insatiable lust for unconditional love

by literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte



Series: Extra Thumbs for Every Crook [4]
Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Cannibalism, Caretaking, Disturbing Themes, Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-18 17:55:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20643296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte/pseuds/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte
Summary: The courier takes care of Lily.He will never grow old and weak; neither will she.





	insatiable lust for unconditional love

**Author's Note:**

> Frank is my courier OC who appears in almost all of my NV fics and if you've read any then you know that he's a very very bad man, and if you haven't, well, there's your warning

_Grandma, when's the last time you tasted human flesh?_

Warm soapsuds trickle between his fingers as he sponges Lily's back, where her spine extends like a centipede from the hard muscle and scar tissue. When she breathes, that centipede moves and he dreams of her innards moving with it, shiny and slick, squirming to life. A thousand little legs push meat down her gullet and arrange themselves in the shape of her bones.

Frank dreams of taking a knife to her belly and unraveling her intestines while she sleeps, slack-jawed and drooling in a pool of pulsing green guts. He'd crawl inside - kill Leo, take his place in the sweet grey warmth of her cortex, deepen her missed doses and memory lapses until they vanished into the desert as the apex predator.

Dried mud flakes off and streaks of blood turn the water a strange pink. _Do you miss it? The hunt, the kill?_ Her eyelashes are crusted with sand and dirt. Her teeth are like dried heads on raider spikes and her breath reeks of stomach acid. The veins of her neck bulge like parasites close to bursting. Every night since she followed him out of Jacobstown, he listened to the heavy _hrrrr-hrrrr_ of her beside him. Now he can feel it, rising and falling under his hands with the rhythm of an ancient machine.

He didn't know mutants, let alone nightkin, were capable of sleep. He wonders if it's real, if she's only mimicking him or following old human routines. She trusts him enough to close her eyes, to take her pills, to kill other men. To sit in the bath. He wrings the sponge out and cleans behind her ears with a rag. Her hands, those large slabs of meat, tighten around the sides of the tub. Those hands once cradled infants, washed their sweet-smelling scalps. _How did you think you would die? Peacefully, in your sleep? Surrounded by loved ones?_ As he wipes the mucus drying around her nose, he thinks he would rather die young.

In the mirror he catches his own eye and smiles. Of course he couldn't do it; he likes his face too much to live forever. Dreams are only dreams.

"Dearie," Lily rasps, "I think dinner’s ready. Be a sweetheart and get the turkey out of the oven?"

_I'll get the table ready, too, grandma._

Thunder tears a hole in the blue-purple basket of clouds and mends it before he can blink. Outside the abandoned house where Frank bathes Lily, rain holds captive raiders and fiends in the desert. Smoke weaves the night with burned trash and hot flesh as animal and human alike turn crisp over fire spits. Tomorrow he and Lily will clear out the Monte Carlo. He’ll get madly drunk on the whiskey of dead men and dance to the echo of Vegas, wading through blood and ash and gunsmoke. Tomorrow he will dance and dance. He will never grow old and weak; neither will she.

By candlelight he serves dinner - poached ant eggs with pinto beans and cave mushrooms, grilled mesquite corn on the side, and black sausages strange in taste and smell. There is no table for him to set. She wouldn’t fit in a chair and can only digest meat, so he sits on the edge of the bathtub and feeds her the sausage. He pushes into her wide mouth and she chews with the grace of a bighorner calf.

His fingers graze the bumps and blisters of her tongue, and his eyes gleam like lit cigarettes. The iron-salt tang in the air makes him quiver. He reaches the throbbing emptiness a tooth once filled and Lily doesn’t even flinch. Light flashes through the boarded up windows as the storm beats its drum against the roof.

_Grandma, do you love me?_

Meat sticks between her teeth and the straps of her cranial harness. "Do you think Jimmy'll visit this year? I made all this food..."


End file.
